


Just guilt

by iriswesttt



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-25 17:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6203776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iriswesttt/pseuds/iriswesttt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Iris gets seriously hurt and Barry is a butthead and blames himself about it (aka my very angsty fic)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written a while ago for an anon on tumblr who wanted me to break their heart. This is the most angst I could possibly come up with.

Barry was too late again. He promised Iris he would meet her at some hipster bar where CCPN was having a celebratory happy hour. Iris had gotten her first Sunday headline, it was a big deal, he knew that, and he wanted to make it up to her. She complained about how he had changed with her, and how ever since Eddie died they barely even spent time together, not real time anyway, not non-problem-solving or non-family time, and he had agreed. Which was how he ended up at the bar with some pretentious name at a party where he knew no one, after spending the day obsessing about Zoom who had been silent for too long and increasingly sounding like a solution-less problem.

So he was already in a poor mood when he walked in and saw Iris. She threw her head back in laughter at something her new editor was telling her, all his attention focused on her (the new editor who hated the Flash, the editor about whom she had been complaining for weeks now, the same one who placed his hand on her arm, like it was so familiar, like he had done it before, and Iris allowed it). Something like acid slid down Barry’s throat, bubbling on his stomach and he cursed himself for always being too late, even when he was the fastest man alive. Or apparently second best there too, since there was always some super villain who super hated him beating his ass and his speed.

He tried a calming breath. He had promised her. He should probably just go in, congratulate her, greet her a little territorially and wait to see how she would react to that, how the new editor would, but Iris smiled at Scott the way she did sometimes. The first time Barry saw that smile was the day Nicholas Klein asked her to the prom. She had been smitten by him for ages since freshman year Barry suspected. Barry and Iris were standing by her locker when Nicholas approached with a careless and thoughtless  _Hey, West, fancy going to the prom with me?_  and that was the first time that smile had broken Barry’s heart making a recurrent appearance every now and again. Barry found himself shaking, cold sweat on his palms and a sudden and violent sickness on his stomach and he couldn’t bring himself to greet her. He was too late. He should let her be happy, get over Eddie, have a normal relationship in which the biggest problem would be whether or not they agreed on the editorial line and not the nagging fear that some meta-human would use her to get to him.

Barry turned around and ran off before he had time to change his mind, sending Iris a text:  _Sorry, Zoom problems, couldn’t make it._  To further his guilt, she responded immediately: :(  _you own me one, Allen_. Barry re-reads her answer obsessively before falling asleep that night, willing it to mean something it so clearly doesn’t.

* * *

His whole brain is filled with the notion that all that is happening is his fault, Iris is hurt and it’s his fault. He’s engulfed by guilt, slowing him down making matters worse. Cisco called him waking him up at 2 in the morning to let him know that somehow Zoom got Iris, and the CCPN was covering it live. Zoom threatening to let her fall from the rooftop of CCPN in case the Flash didn’t show up to face him, and if Barry had swallowed his pride and met her like he had promised he would he would have been there to protect her. If he wasn’t part of her life in the first place she would have never been in danger.

Zoom makes Barry chase them when he, or rather The Flash arrives, holding Iris by the neck, taking her to the STAR Labs rooftop now. Zoom, stops again and Barry knows that if he wanted to there would be no Iris by now. He’s the one allowing her to live, allowing Barry to chase, all the while questioning and probing her to where is her hero now and how much of a hero could he possibly be if he couldn’t even save her. She’s already unconscious by then and Barry has to hold for an opening, keeping it together by the notion that until the second Zoom drops her, making good of his promise, Barry would never stand a chance. He knows that Zoom is testing him that Zoom is the one that allows Barry catch Iris. Which he does, in the air and for some reason he can’t understand, Zoom doesn’t follow. Leaving Barry praying and begging for anyone who would listen:   _Please, don’t be dead, don’t be dead_. Nothing feels less of a victory than taking Iris to the hospital, except maybe when the doctor tells him, Joe and Wally, 3 hours later, that she has fractured ribs, collapsed lungs, and a dislocated spine. She underwent surgery for internal bleeding and that she needed blood and that no one can predict whether or not there’s any brain damage as a result of the lack of oxygenation. Barry only half listens to the words _induced coma_  before he collapses back at the chair he was sitting, sure he has never felt such pain in his life.

He feels Joe’s eye heavy on him, not even his words  _I thought you were supposed to be doing something together tonight_ , are capable of making it worse. Except for the self-accusation, his brain has on a loop, telling him he didn’t even had the guts to save his mom when he had the chance, he rather trust himself, from an unknown future, even though he can be so wrong, is constantly so wrong. And now he’s ruined the life of the person he loves the most, he violated her trust, he left her because he was too wrapped up in stupid jealousy.

There’s no tears left in him, though. No strength or courage either, just a hollowness and a vague certainty that the world will never warm up again. Wally paces up and down in front of him, after having punched Barry, yelling he should have been there, he should have kept her save. Barry doesn’t have it in him to react to any of it. Wally was right, he deserved to be punched and yelled at, he deserved to be in the hospital bed, him, not Iris, whose only fault was to carry all the kindness and sunshine of his world.

 

* * *

 

After a full month in the hospital Iris finally gets discharged. She couldn’t take any of it anymore. The dull walls and the sick smell of disinfectant, and Wally and her dad treating her like an invalid, questioning if the doctor was sure she was good enough to go to the bathroom by herself and to stay without the IV, and having to be examined by a doctor two times a day.

She couldn’t take the lack of Barry either. 

She saw him twice and only on the day she woke up, the first time she was too weak, her throat still badly hurt to manage to speak. Then later that day when he came back they had a short conversation he wanted some guarantee Iris figured that she would fully recover and she had told him;

“No brain damage, I promise you. Nothing you haven’t recovered from.”

And he laughed a humourless laugh and never came back afterwards. She thought she saw a telling of lightning once or twice, when she was falling asleep, but convinced herself it was a combination of wishful thinking and the painkillers. She never thought that there was something that could hurt more than an entire broken body, but leave it to Barry Allen and he would manage it. 

It was worse than the months that he spend on coma. It was easily the worse pain she had ever felt, worse than loosing Eddie or her mom, worse than anything, cause he had a choice now. He was making this stupidly wrong choice. She constantly felt she was going through the stages of grief, except she kept going back and forward from depression and anger. Sometimes she wanted to kill him for daring to think this decision was his. Firmly believing that she would never forgive him, wanting him to feel the same pain he was infringing her, having him come back so she could be the one to leave. Then she would miss him so much that she would take him in any shape and form, she would forgive him without him even asking just to look into his eyes again make sure she wasn’t imagining the way his irises changed colours from the outer corner to the inner corner, blue then green, just to see his smile and the little dimples and his messy hair.  And then she would want to kill him again.

He manages to keep this up for another month after she leaves the hospital, turning into shadow, or rather lighting, every time she’s around the corner. Then on a Monday she resolves she won’t ever speak to him again even if he comes back begging full of regret. She’s the one freezing him out, and that lasts till 4 in the morning of the next Saturday when she wakes up of the usual nightmares and it was Barry again, drowning on a tsunami this time, and she can’t control her hands, reaching for her cellphone by her nightstand and writing;

_Are you awake?_

She wasn’t expecting an answer. He had skillfully avoided even typing anything and then deciding against it and she had obsessively watched his name on the text app. She wasn’t even sure he was reading her messages, better to avoid temptation all together seemed to be his motto this days, so Iris felt something electric on her lungs when she read.

_Yeah._

It takes a full minute of the breathing exercises the doctor had instructed her to do, and some typing and deleting for her to decide what she wants to say.

_I had a nightmare._

_That makes two of us then._

_Synchronized nightmares now? Guess you can’t get rid of me that easily. Your subconscious won’t let you._

Iris holds her breath waiting and watches the _Barry is typing_ appears and disappears from his status, as he takes an infinity, and it gets her thinking she went too far and he’ll stop answering all together until;

_Iris_

She smiles at that. God, she hates that he doesn’t even have to say he’s sorry and she’ll forgive him. She hates that she needs him. But she does need him, she has accept this much, she just prays that somehow he needs her too and that that is stronger than his resolution at some point.

 _You know, for me to be able to understand what the_  Iris _meant this time I have to actually hear it._

Even though she knows exactly how that sounded like she even knows the way he crooked his head, and the little smile that formed on his lips against his will. She misses him. She misses him so much she’s constantly miserable, it’s so big it aches on her bones. An ache that has nothing to do with the fractures, it spreads through her blood and reaches everywhere. And she knows he must ache too which is why she has been trying so hard to understand why someone would self inflict such a pain. 

_Ok._

And just like that he’s knocking on her door.

* * *

The first time she wakes up that morning it’s to Barry by her side. He’s still sleeping, his pretty long eyelashes tangling together and their legs ended up intertwined during the night somehow. She enjoys the fact he has his nose between her boobs, over the t-shirt she’s wearing, but still, his warm steady breath is comforting, and Iris wills herself back to sleep before she can think things through, before he senses her awake and wakes up too and then everything would be broken again. The second time she wakes up that morning she turns on her bed, searching for Barry to find an empty cold pillow instead. Yesterday when he showed up at her door wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, his hair down, and looking all soft and huggable, she actually believed that in the morning they would talk things through, now he has left her again.

After checking the rest of her apartment and not finding any traces of him she allows herself to do things slowly, wash her face, and brush her teeth and take her headscarf off as she swallows the bitterness of having him leaving her again, of believing he wouldn’t.

When she walks into her kitchen she’s surprise to find Barry, finishing the coffee. He handles her a cup, saying he steamed her milk and if it’s not strong enough for her he can do a Jitters run to which she replies;

“I thought you left.”

“I went to that bakery in New York you liked, I got you brownies and carrot cake with white chocolate icing, actually the cake is mostly for me.”

She can’t help the smile, studying the way he avoids her eyes, looking at the coffee pot, his mug, the brownies and cake and some croissant he brought back, above her head and everywhere around her and she suspects as to why. She’s long noticed all the ways he actively avoids to face her. Probably because when he does face her, his expression will always drop and soften, and there will be something intangible in his eyes.

At the moment she’s actually glad he’s avoiding her eyes because the second his face turns into that she’ll forgive him completely and she doesn’t want to just yet. Iris tries to focus on something else, — catches herself suddenly wondering if he actually went to New York in his sweatpants and t-shirt, even with the weather the way it is, or if he changed back into it when he arrived — as she looks at his bare feet against her kitchen floor and mulls over how that stupid little thing could possibly brighten her mood more than the brownies she doesn’t feel like eating somehow.

“So all the trouble of going to New York, is that just guilt or…”

He looks back at her and all the air seem to leave her lungs so she looks down at her coffee, sipping on it as he answers with just an _Iris_ , followed by a grave  _I’m sorry_.

“That’s it? You spend two months literally running away from me and then, just like that you decide to come back and all you have to say is that you’re sorry?”

He raises his shoulders, like he can’t possibly have an explanation and then he offers;

“It’s my fault, it’s my fault you ended up at a hospital bed for a month. It’s my fault you get nightmares now. You’re better off without me.”

And she shakes her head. She hates how stupid and stubborn he can actually be.

“You don’t get to decide that. And that is not your fault. That is that psychopath’s fault. That is because I choose to write about the Flash. I’ve chosen it before knowing it was you. The fact that you hurt me is your fault, what you can control is what you are to blame.”

He forces himself to look at her and she sees the tears forming in his eyes.  _Good_ , she thinks,  _he should suffer._  And it must have somehow shown on her face cause he questions her;

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No, I don’t want you to leave.”

“Iris.”

It’s a pleading _Iris_ , begging even. A  _tell me how to make it better_  one, but she doesn’t have the answer to that. They would both just figure it out, learn to deal, but there’s something she dwell over too many times while he wasn’t speaking to her, trying to figure out how he could possibly take the pain she knew he must have felt, so she offers;

“I know that the way you feel time now is different, you don’t see it the same way anymore, things are not in order for you, you get to travel through it and I know that a few minutes can seem like an eternity but you forget that it’s not like that for me, and if I loose you  — knowing that we’ve wasted months”, her throat closes and she can’t possibly finish it; “— I think if you loose me you’ll regret that too. That is what you can control, Barry.”

He steps towards her and Iris takes a step back. She sees his face turning quizzical, like he’s trying to understand, like he couldn’t possibly know why she’s so weary to offer him anything more than simply standing three feet apart. She takes a deep breath, trying to explain;

“Zoom and all those meta-humans they don’t have the power to hurt me like you do, Barry, and you don’t seem to realise that. You have that power because I gave it to you. I trusted you.”

“Iris — I…”

But then his phone is ringing and she knows, by reading his face that it must be something important. 

“You have to go?”

“No”, then closes his eyes like it’s too painful to say; “Yeah. I do.”

“Ok.”

She doesn’t want him to leave, she wants him, in her kitchen, bare feet, making her coffee and trying to get her to forgive him. But she has already. She just has to trust him again. So she doesn’t move when he steps closer this time, his hand reaching for hers and she lets him hold it, feeling his fingers on her knuckles as he asks;

“Can I come back? Afterwards.”

“Afterwards when?”

“Lunch. I’ll take you to lunch.”

“Are you gonna be late?”

He smiles his big smile, like he already knows her answer and she figures he must then, even before she does, and he promises;

“No.”

And she smiles back at him and listens carefully as he utters the smallest  _Ok_ before turning into light again.

* * *

 

 

The biggest thanks to my dearest [Ishipit87](http://ishipit87.tumblr.com) for beta-ing this.


	2. Chapter 2

Iris watches as Barry laughs at Cisco’s joke, his eyes crinkling sweetly and she can’t explain why that hurts. They are all at Barry and hers favourite dart pub and things aren’t being interrupted for once and it should be light and fun and instead something weights on Iris chest as she swallows a bit of her margarita, licking the salt around the glass and feeling the little crystals melt on her tongue.

Barry apparently notices something, turning to her, eyebrows knit together in a quizzical look, and Iris downs the rest of her drink in one go and tells them she should leave. Barry jumps to his feet to it but remains quiet as Caitlin asks Iris if she wants a ride home.

“No, no, I’ll grab a taxi. You guys should stay, I don’t want to end your night.”

“Iris —”, Barry mumbles by her side and she flashes him her best attempt of smile and says;

“I’ll see you later”, and turns to leave, without looking back, without properly saying goodbye to any of them, before the tears she feels forming have a chance out of her eyes.

Barry follows her though, outside the pub, to the dirty sidewalk, and maybe the second margarita was actually a mistake cause she feels slightly dizzy, though the cold air cutting her face helps a little. And on the relativity quiet of the street Barry asks her;

“Iris, what’s wrong?”

And she so doesn’t want to have this conversation right now. It’s not like she could explain it anyway. Maybe it was just fear that he’ll suddenly decide to leave her again. It’s been two months and she has promised Barry she has forgiven him but sometimes it would still hurt this never ending pain. Maybe it was bitterness as well. Whenever she would see Barry laughing and happy with Cisco and Caitlin or somebody else, somebody not her, she would imagine him doing so while she cried herself to sleep every other night because _he_ had decided to be out of her life, and the world would then loose a bit of colour and she would get a sudden urge to hurt him rushing over her. Maybe she hasn’t forgiven him as much as she thought she had.

She takes one deep breath willing the dizziness away.

“Nothing is wrong”, she assures him; “I just have an article to finish, I should be up early tomorrow so…”

She knows he isn’t buying it, she still can read him like that. She also knows he won’t insist: he has been resistance free ever since he showed up at her door with no excuses and a lame ass apology, like pretending he didn’t know her, like pretending to believe in everything she said and pretending that everything was ok when it so clearly wasn’t, was the solution to whatever it was they were going through.

“Let me take you home then, please?”

“No, Barry, it’s not necessary.”

“Please?”

She shakes her head and he tries again;

“Come on, Iris, I’ll feel better knowing for sure you’re safe.”

“I can handle myself”, Iris tells him, signalling a cab that stops right in front of her and it saddens her that the prospect of being free of Barry brings her some relief.

He slips into the car besides her though and Iris closes her eyes as she gives her address to the driver, silently praying _please, don’t be sick, don’t be sick._ She opens the widow all the way, concentrating on the white noise the cold wind makes against her ear. It’s paradoxical how much she wants him there at the same time she doesn’t. It’s ironic how much she prayed for him to see it to his senses while he wasn’t there and how much she wishes for him to just disappear now that he is.

He doesn’t say another word. There’s too much they are avoiding telling each other these days and the talk would just die down on this sort of silence she has never shared with Barry before. He doesn’t leave her side either, paying the driver before she has a chance to reach for her purse and standing by her side, patiently, as she struggles with her keys. Barry closes her front door behind him and watches as she takes her shoes off, a little off balance, and as his eyes never leave her she suddenly gets mad again. What does he think? That she’ll invite him for a sleep over? That is so not happening.

“You can leave now”, she tells him. “I’m home. Safe and sound.”

“Iris…” he starts, but never actually finishes it. Like she’s supposed to guess what he means.

_Iris, I know you’re still mad._

_Iris, I know you haven’t fully forgiven me._

_Iris, I’m sorry._

But whatever. He has to actually say it for a change. She’s tired of guessing, of forgiving. Tired of how that is a daily exercise. Of how for some moments she actually believes she’s over it. Of how he has broken them. And there are the tears again.

She takes a deep steading breath and swallows dry. Barry hasn’t moved, he just stands, his back against her front door, five feet of distance between them, and she hates that he’s pretty in his grey coat and tight jeans and new shoes. They are boots for a change and it’s weird he’s not wearing sneakers. She had to blackmail him into wearing oxfords to both of his graduations so it’s weird that he would wear chukkas and that she wasn’t even the one to buy them for him. And then she considers the possibility they were a gift from _Paaa-tty Spiiivot_ and she wants to punch him.         

She slips out of her overcoat and undoes the zipper on the lateral of her tight white dress and maybe she’s testing him. Maybe she’s testing herself. It fills her with a warmth though, that she can dare him to move like that, that he doesn’t move, that she can tease him and he will take it. 

Barry looks like he has forgotten to breath so she allows herself a self satisfied smile while the fabric of her dress, which she pulls over her head, covers her face and she’s left standing in her white underwear and her new white lace strappy bra. And they are slightly see through and it gives her a weird sense of power, the way he inhales sharply, trying to focus his eyes on anything else, on her wooden floor, on the posters she has on her walls, only to inevitably fall back into her again, hypnotised, and it’s like he’s the one naked. That is until he says;

“Yeah, you are right, I should leave.”

* * *

 

So there’s the head ache. There’s also the humiliation every time she thinks of herself taking her dress off, and of Barry just leaving. 

Seems to be a theme these days: Barry leaves.

She’s tired of the back and forth in her mind of the believing she has forgiven him and the realising that what he did feels unforgivable. But on her warm lavender smelling bubble bath, in the soft morning light that slips in though her bathroom window, she realises that the fear that filled her that kissing Barry, wanting him, wanting for him to want her, the fear that that could ruin them, makes no sense anymore. She wants him so she should have him. So when she shows up at his lab the later that day, and of course he’s working on a Saturday, she has made up her mind, no alcohol needed.

“Iris, hi!”, he greets her in a strangely high pitched voice and maybe she’s not the only one replaying what happened at her apartment last night in an obsessively manner.

“Hey, I — Barry, we should talk.”

He nods as she steps closer to him. Steadily and carefully, one step at a time until he’s standing at arm’s reach.

“I’m still mad”, she says.

“Yeah, I — I know.”

Of course he knows. They had been avoiding saying it but it’s not like they don’t understand each other, instinctively even.

“I want to forgive you, sometimes I think I’ve had, specially when it’s just you and me, but then something will remind me of it and…”

He nods again, and there are tears in his pretty green eyes, and they stuck to his long eyelashes and he smells like Barry, like Saturday mornings when they were 12 and they would spend it in their pyjamas playing video games and watching cartoons and doing nothing, and life wasn’t easy, it had never really been easy, but he made it simple and comfortable and fun. Or like the day he left for college and she hugged him so tight and afraid to let go. Or like the nights he couldn't sleep and she would let him turn his back to her on the bed, so he could cry and she could pretend she hadn’t noticed it. Or the day he gave her her mother’s wedding band and it made her warm and tingle.

“Iris, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to do to make it better.”

She shakes her head willing herself to not cry.

“There’s nothing you can do. We just have to accept that things will be difficult. It’ll be different.”

“Iris, no!”, and he has a panicked look on his face and it’s when something like that happens, when she has this need to protect him and make things better for him that she believes that it will be fine. It’s not the same though.

“I’m still hurt. It hurt me and it can’t just be undone.”

He shakes his head in response, staring at her shoes, and she continues;

“Which is why I think we should have sex.”

His eyes snap back up at her face, traveling between her lip and her eyes as he stutters;

“Wha— what?”

But she has thought this through, she has a rational reasonable justification to it so she calmly explains;

“If we wait until we’re completely fine again then I won’t want it anymore, I won’t want to risk things and I won’t want for our relationship to change. Now, I want you, if you don’t want me anymore —”

“Iris, no, that’s — of course I want you.”

She locks her gaze into his eyes and she feels him trying to slip away from it but she holds him in place and says;

“I don’t know, you seemed to be pretty much over me while you were with Patty.”

And he closes his eyes at it and shakes his head.

“No, Iris, you’re… no one will ever — I was never over you.”

“Ok, then, if you want me and I want you we should do it.”

Iris steps towards him again, backing Barry up until his knees hit his lab chair and he falls sited on it. She climbs on his lap, her legs straddling his and her stomach does a somersault of anticipation. Barry’s breathing laboured under her even though he’s not even actively touching her yet. Even though he has super speed. And Iris smiles proudly at it. She grabs his hands on hers and places them on her back and now that he has permission it takes no time for him to sneak them under her top and his hands traveling up and down her spine and to her belly send waves of electricity through her and it’s so much better than she expected for it to be.

When their lips touch she feels the same jolt she felt on her fingertips twice in her life and it’s almost like she was expecting it, like she knew it would happen. Barry is the one truly surprised by it. He pulls away, fingers on his lips and a muted;

“What was that?”

And Iris smiles sweetly at him before going back to a real kiss this time.

* * *

 

It’s been three months and as Iris lets out one last satisfied moan he stands there, her skin under his fingers, sweat glistening down her chest bones, her cheeks pink and her lips swollen from the kissing and sucking and biting (she likes to bite and then complain about how he would heal too fast so she could never actually leave a mark on him) and as he rests his forehead on hers it is all he can think about. 

Their anniversary or whatever it was. Three months of kissing and touching and fucking and he still doesn’t know exactly what this is, what they are, except it’s fucking glorious so he doesn’t say anything. Three months and still no one knows about them. Maybe Barry was getting good in keeping secrets, maybe it was just that keeping a secret with Iris was actually way easier than keeping a secret from her. 

Iris slips off the bathroom sink where he had her balanced against, from under him, and her breathing is laboured and he can see her shaking a little as she sinks down on the bathtub and he watches her chest rising and falling as she crosses her legs over the rim and he decides to sink down by her side as Iris lets a laugh out and then asks him;

“What is up with you today?”

“What do you mean?”, he asks, brushing her hair off her face and she pulls his bottom lip between her teeth, and then sucks on it before answering;

“I mean you’re usually more desperate, specially the first round.”

It’s their anniversary is what’s up with him. He arrived at Iris apartment to find her in her bathroom, already naked, getting ready for a bath she never had a chance to actually run is what’s up with him. The fact that she’s so pretty and kind and generous and that he has this unwritten permission to touch her is what’s up with him, that he wants to marry her and spend the rest of his life naked by her side. That and the fact that he seem to be feeling all of it heightened today but he doesn’t say any of that, instead he questions her, while kissing delicately on her neck;

“You don’t like slow?”

“I like slow. That’s not the point.”

“What’s the point then?”

She pulls him back by the hair. Sometimes Iris can get aggressive, not too much, just a little, with the bites that would definitively bruise without the accelerated healing and digging her nails on his back and on his ass and pulling his hair. And it’s a contrast with how caring and sweet she usually is, something he had never seen in her until they started fucking, so it’s always thrilling.

“You’ve never controlled my pace before”, she explains, still holding him back and he points out that she didn’t seem to mind it much in the moment.

“I didn’t mind”, she says, and then she adds, bending her head to the right as if to make a point; “ _much_. So, what has gotten into you?”, she insists and he’s surprised about how perceptive she is even though he shouldn’t, Iris would always know when something was up with him and the fact that he had spend the day obsessing about the changed nature of their relationship was always gonna be obvious to her, but he tries diverging;  

“Nothing. Into you on the other hand.”

She laughs and straddles him, brushing his hair off his forehead and asking;

“Oh, what has gotten into me?”

“Me”, he says simply, with a smug smile and Iris laughs again, biting his left eyebrow and she says; 

“Your sex puns are so not funny.”

“Oh, come one, not even the pussy eating grin?”

“Nope”, she says, nuzzling on his collarbones, kissing it.

“You always laugh”, he points out.

“That’s cause you’re cute”, she kisses him on the lips now, bringing herself closer, plastered to him; “and it’s my pussy you’re eating”, and the way she says it, softly, lazily, doesn’t match the sentence somehow.

“So it’s a possessive thing?”

“Pretty much.”

He cups her boobs just because. Because she lets him to.

“Iris?”

“What?”, she asks absently, biting on his shoulder.

He takes in a deep breath, gathering the courage he needs to ask what he’s about to;  

“Are we dating?”

She rises to her knees and her nipples are right on his vision line, but she pulls him by the hair again, forcing him to look up at her and asks;

“Barry Allen, are you seeing someone else?”

“No, that’s not —” and that’s when he sees in her eyes she’s not really serious about it; “I just — I don’t really know if you’re my girlfriend.”

She cradles his cheeks in her hands, slowly lowering them to his neck, her fingers close to his ears and she bumps their noses together and then kisses the point of his and tells him, firmly;

“ _You_ are _mine_.”

“I don’t mind being yours.”

And it’s not just that he doesn’t mind, it just that it is simply truth. And that he actually enjoys being hers.

“Good”, she says, reaching to the handle of the bathtub and he’s not prepare to the freezing water hitting on his butt. 

“Holy shit that’s cold water.”

She laughs at him, twisting his ears in her hands.

“It’ll get warm real soon and then you'll leave so I can do what I was planning on doing before you came in.”

But she settles back down on his lap again, her skin against his and she’s warm and he can’t help the words that come out of his lips;

“Iris, I love you.”

And maybe love is not enough to describe it, sometimes it seems that whatever it is that he feels for her can’t possibly fit in such a small phrase but after three months of actively holding it in it’s freeing to say it.

“I knew something was up with you today”, she says, like he finally answered her first question, and he supposes in a way he has, but then he has the need to let her know that it’s not about today, it's not like he had stopped loving her since he last told her;

“That’s — that’s not — is not a new development.”

“I know that, you’re just focused on it.”

He moves from under her, so they are side by side again and he tells her; 

“It’s been three months.”

“I know.”

“Today.”

“I know.”

And sometimes Iris will be too quiet and Barry knows it’s how she process things and that talking about her feelings is never exactly easy for her but he has something unsettling him today and he has to know; 

“Have you forgiven me?

“I’ve forgiven you. For real this time.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really”, she nods at him then she inhales deeply and says; “I just like that when we're here it’s you and me and I get you all for myself”, and it's a whisper, like a secret, like maybe she’s just admitting it to herself as well and he flicks his finger to the tip if her nose as this happiness courses through him.

“I like it when it’s just you and me too.”

“But you want to tell people.”

And it's not a question and he supposes she's right. He pulls her to him again.

“I just wanna kiss you whenever I feel like, even if there’s people around.”

“Ok”, she smiles at him. “Now get out of my bath.”

He feigns offence with an _Oh, come on,_ to which she answers with a _nope_ , and he flips them so he’s over her and Iris pushes him away with her feet and with a high pitched giggle and he’s a big fan of the three months anniversary all the sudden.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at my tumblr iriswestthings.


End file.
